They may have stopped drawing Muhammad but Charlie Hebdo still has something to say

by SB on April 7, 2016 at 11:30am

Charlie Hebdo was itself the victim of an Islamist terror attack on 7 January 2015 Reuters

You could be forgiven for thinking that after having most of their staff slaughtered by Muslim terrorists, Charlie Hebdo would be given a free pass when it comes to their bias about Islam. After all, the few remaining staff alive after the massacre were so badly affected that they committed to never draw Muhammed again. This decision was not because they thought drawing Mohammed was wrong but because of fear. It is quite understandable that an organisation that had their staff slaughtered for the crime of drawing a cartoon would have a very dim view of the religion that spawned such intolerance. Despite this, critics have not held back from savaging a recent article in the magazine.

The editors of the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo are facing criticism for an article linking the Brussels terror attacks to ordinary Muslims in Europe.

In an editorial entitled “How did we end up here?” the magazine which suffered its own terror attack on 7 January 2015 gave its response to the bombings in Belgium two weeks ago which killed 32 people.

“In reality, the attacks are merely the visible part of a very large iceberg indeed,” the article suggests, before describing a terror attack as the “end of a philosophical line” for a society which tolerates women wearing burqas or bakers not offering ham or bacon.

Charlie Hebdo’s authors argue: “This is not to victimise Islam particularly. For it has no opponent. It is not Christianity, Hinduism nor Judaism that is balked by the imposition of this silence. It is the opponent (and protector) of them all. It is the very notion of the secular. It is secularism which is being forced into retreat.”

The article has been condemned by campaigners for diversity in the media, particularly after Charlie Hebdo was last year awarded the PEN “Freedom of Expression Courage Award”.

Media Diversified suggested the article “slandered individuals who practice Islam” as well as Islam itself, adding that the former “results in violence we have seen against young women and elderly men”.

A recent hit-and-run on a Muslim woman that the media were quick to call a Hate crime turned out to be committed by a young Muslim named Muhammad. While it may be true that there is intolerance shown towards some Muslims, the sheer scale of the violence, rapes and sexual abuse towards non-Muslims by Muslims in Europe renders the few examples of intolerance against Muslims as statistically unimportant. It is like complaining that a pea was shot at an innocent Girl Guide when there have been thousands of instances where Girl Guides have been handing out poisoned Girl Guide cookies and making hundreds of thousands of people ill and killing hundreds.

The Al Jazeera presenter Mehdi Hasan tweeted a range of criticisms of the article, including an opinion piece in response to Charlie Hebdo by the Nigerian-American writer Teju Cole.

Cole said he had to “carefully scrutinise” the piece before he believed it genuinely came from Charlie Hebdo, and that the authors “finally step away from the mask of ‘it’s satire and you don’t get it’ to state clearly that Muslims, all of them, no matter how integrated, are the enemy”.

He wrote that reading the editorial it was “hard not to recall the vicious development of “the Jewish question” in Europe and the horrifying persecution it resulted in”.

Talk about hyperbole! Charlie Hebdo criticises a religious and political ideology and comments that secularism is failing to stand up for its values and Mehdi Hasan immediately jumps to comparisons with the holocaust?

“Charlie’s logic is frighteningly similar: that there are no innocent Muslims, that ‘something must be done’ about these people, regardless of their likeability, their peacefulness, or their personal repudiation of violence,” Cole writes.

“Such categorization of an entire community as an insidious poison is a move we have seen before.”

-independent.co.uk

In ten minutes I could easily find five clear examples of Imams on Youtube inside the West preaching violence and hate towards the West. Using Google I could easily find five examples of Islamic terrorist attacks on the West and I could easily find five examples of Islam demanding special rights inside Western schools, universities and jobs. There is a problem with Islam inside Western culture and it does need to be discussed. Pretending that there is no problem because not all Muslims are violent is not going to solve the problem.

Je Suis Charlie, you have earned your right to freedom of speech and opinion in the most violent and bloody way possible. You have been brought to your knees by Islamic extremists and if anyone has the right to criticise Islam it is you.

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